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Trait social anxiety may predict differences in the cognitive control of emotional distraction when emotional face discrimination is required. This effect can be investigated using an emotional face flanker task. This study addresses an important research gap, as previous studies did not separate the effects of trait social interaction anxiety from the effects of trait social phobia upon emotional face flanker task performance. In this laboratory based behavioural experiment, the 87 participants (mean age 24.3) were university students or staff recruited via departmental adverts. We used an emotional (happy versus fearful) face flanker task, and assessed sub-clinical social anxiety with the SIAS/SPS. Elevated trait social phobia was related to an increased reaction time (RT) congruency effect, whereas trait social interaction anxiety was not. Elevated trait social interaction anxiety was related to a decreased happy face RT advantage for central target faces, but the effect of trait social phobia was very weak. Trait social interaction anxiety and trait social phobia may predict subtle differences when the cognitive control of reactions to emotional facial expressions is required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies have reported the "emotional congruency effect (ECE)" in cross-modal emotion processing, claiming that multimodal congruent emotional signals will enhance the emotion processing, yet few studies have shown how this effect is dynamically processed over time and whether it is achieved in the same way across language and cultural backgrounds. We adopted the eye-tracking technique to investigate whether and how the audio emotional signal influences the visual processing of emotional faces according to ECE. We explored this issue by asking thirty-two native Mandarin speakers to scan a visual array of four types of emotional faces while listening to the affective prosody matching one of the four emotions. To eliminate the potential confounding from lexico-semantic information, the affective prosody is pronounced in meaningless di-syllable clusters. Results of the experiment indicate that (1) participants paid more attention to happy faces at first glance and their attention shifted to angry and sad faces over time. (2) Consistent with findings in English-speaking settings, ECE appeared in Mandarin-speaking settings, but took effect earlier in happy faces and persisted in all emotions as the unfolding of the signal. Based on the results, we conclude that the processing time differs across emotion types and therefore ECE takes effect in different temporal points according to the emotion type. Finally, we suggest that language and cultural experience may shape the processing time of different emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies on working memory processing characteristics of anxious people have focused more on effects of trait than state anxiety, especially the processing characteristics of working memory under emotional faces. Learning anxiety not only affects teenagers' learning but also their life and overall personality development. This is the first study to examine adolescents with learning anxiety and explore effects of different negative emotional faces on working memory. Adolescents with learning anxiety (n = 30) and typically developing (n = 30) adolescents completed the emotional 2-back task with both facial emotion and gender as target stimulus. When facial emotion was the target stimulus, the two groups were asked to remember facial emotions (anger, sadness, and neutral). When facial gender was the target and facial emotion was the background stimulus, the two groups remembered the facial gender. Working memory performance in the learning anxiety group was worse than in the typically developing group. When facial emotion was the target stimulus, angry and sad faces significantly interfered with working memory performance in the learning anxiety group. When facial gender was the target stimulus and facial emotion was the background stimulus, the interference effect of negative emotion was greater and the accuracy was lower in the learning anxiety group. Therefore, different from the biased effect of trait anxiety on negative emotions, negative emotions (anger and sadness) interfere with the working memory of adolescents in the learning anxiety group. This interference exists regardless of whether negative emotions are the target or background. This result suggests recommendations for educational practices. That is, the interference from negative emotions on students should be avoided, especially those with learning anxiety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anorexia nervosa (AN) is characterized by attention biases for eating disorder-related information as well as altered attentional processing of social information. However, little is known about the interplay between the altered attentional processing of these two types of information. The present study investigates attention biases for eating disorder-related information (pictures of bodies) versus social information (pictures of faces), in adolescents with AN. Attention biases were assessed via eye-tracking during a passive-viewing task in which female bodies and faces were presented simultaneously and thus competed directly for attention. Female adolescents (13–18 years) with AN (n = 28) were compared to a clinical comparison group (adolescents with major depression; n = 20) and a comparison group of adolescents with no mental illness (n = 24). All groups looked longer at bodies than at faces, i.e., showed attention biases for bodies in maintenance of attention. These biases were more pronounced in adolescents with AN than in both comparison groups, particularly for underweight bodies, at the expense of looking less at social stimuli. The results indicate "dual" attention biases in adolescents with AN (i.e., towards bodies and away from emotional faces) which could have a twofold negative impact on eating disorder psychopathology: increased attention to eating disorder-related information might directly influence eating disorder symptoms while less attention to social information might have an indirect influence through the amplification of interpersonal difficulties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Voxel-wise meta-analyses of task-evoked regional activity were conducted for healthy individuals during the unconscious processing of emotional and neutral faces with an aim to examine whether and how different experimental paradigms influenced brain activation patterns. Studies were categorized into sensory and attentional unawareness paradigms. Thirty-four fMRI studies including 883 healthy participants were identified. Across experimental paradigms, unaware emotional faces elicited stronger activation of the limbic system, striatum, inferior frontal gyrus, insula and the temporal lobe, compared to unaware neutral faces. Crucially, in attentional unawareness paradigms, unattended emotional faces elicited a right-lateralized increased activation (i.e., right amygdala, right temporal pole), suggesting a right hemisphere dominance for processing emotional faces during inattention. By contrast, in sensory unawareness paradigms, unseen emotional faces elicited increased activation of the left striatum, the left amygdala and the right middle temporal gyrus. Additionally, across paradigms, unconsciously processed positive emotions were found associated with more activation in temporal and parietal cortices whereas unconsciously processed negative emotions elicited stronger activation in subcortical regions, compared to neutral faces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both hedonic and eudemonic components of well-being have been related to different variables such as mental and physical health, or social and economic factors. However, and despite the growing interest in the study of well-being, there is scarce evidence on the role that these components play in high cognitive processes such as attentional deployment towards emotional information. The aim of the present study is to disentangle the relation between current affect (state hedonic well-being), integrative well-being (i.e. hedonic, eudaimonic and social well-being), and attentional biases towards emotional information. Participants (N = 119) performed and eye-tracking task where they were asked to freely watch a series of 108 pairs of faces depicting happy, sad or neutral expressions in three types of conditions (i.e. happy vs. neutral, sad vs. neutral, and happy vs. sad faces). Results showed that both current affect and integrative well-being were associated with a maintenance attentional bias towards positive information (i.e. happy faces). Further, using bootstrapping mediation analysis, we found that the relation observed between current affect and positive maintenance attentional biases was totally mediated by integrative well-being levels. We discuss the relevance of the present results in the incipient research on cognitive and emotional processes and well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been suggested that atypical emotional face processing strategies observed in autism may extend in milder form to the general population. We investigated the relationship between autistic traits (AT) and gaze behaviour in a neurotypical adult sample. Novel naturalistic videos featuring happy, fearful and neutral faces were first validated in a sample of 22 participants. A separate sample of participants (N = 67) then viewed the three videos in counterbalanced order. Eye-tracking data showed that participants looked longer at emotional than neutral faces, and exploration of facial features varied with emotional condition. AT did not influence viewing patterns, time to first fixation or number of early fixations. We conclude that AT in the general population do not affect visual processing of emotional faces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: Retreats are a usual component of mindfulness practice. There is robust evidence in favor of their beneficial effects on mental health and mood regulation. Yet, there is much less evidence on changes in key psychological mechanisms associated with retreats. During retreats, participants engage in intensive meditation practices focused on training attention, which is one of the main components of meditation. The aim of the current study was to assess changes, associated with retreats, in attentional bias towards emotional stimuli using eye-tracking methodologies. Methods: Participants were volunteers who attended a 1-month Vipassana retreat (N = 20) and a control group of meditators (N = 25) equivalent in age, gender, and years of experience in meditation, who did not attend the retreat. Gaze patterns exhibited towards emotional stimuli (i.e., pairs of happy-neutral, sad-neutral, and happy-sad faces) were assessed on two occasions. In the retreat group (RG), the assessment was conducted one day before starting the retreat and one day after ending it, whereas in the control group (CG), the two assessments were separated by a 1-month period. Results: Regarding the maintenance of attention, results showed that the RG group had a significant reduction in the time spent looking at sad faces in the sad-neutral pairs of faces. In relation to deployment of attention, there was no significant change associated with the retreat or the passing of time. Conclusions: These findings provide preliminary evidence that retreats may be effective at diminishing the salience of negative stimuli which, in turn, may be beneficial for emotional functioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A core feature of Autistic Spectrum Condition (ASC) is the presence of difficulties in social interactions. This can be explained by an atypical attentional processing of social information: individuals with ASC may show problems with orienting attention to socially relevant stimuli and/or inhibiting their attentional responses to irrelevant ones. To shed light on this issue, we examined attentional orienting and inhibitory control to emotional stimuli (angry, happy, and neutral faces). An antisaccade task (with both prosaccade and antisacade blocks) was applied to a final sample of 29 children with ASC and 27 children with typical development (TD). Whereas children with ASC committed more antisaccade errors when seeing angry faces than happy or neutral ones, TD children committed more antisaccade errors when encountering happy faces than neutral faces. Furthermore, latencies in the prosaccade and antisaccade blocks were longer in children with ASC and they were associated with the severity of ASC symptoms. Thus, children with ASC showed an impaired inhibitory control when angry faces were presented. This bias to negative high-arousal information is congruent with affective information-processing theories on ASC, suggesting that threatening stimuli induce an overwhelming response in ASC. Therapeutic strategies where train the shift attention to emotional stimuli (i.e. faces) may improve ASC symptomatology and their socials functioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individuals diagnosed with a depressive disorder have been found to show reduced reactions to emotional information consistent with the hypothesis of an emotional context insensitivity. However, there are contradictory findings of enhanced reactivity and mood-congruent processing. Electroencephalography (EEG) recordings of the late positive potential (LPP) can display such blunted or enhanced activity. Due to these contradictory findings, there is a need to clarify the role of the LPP in the emergence and presence of depressive disorders especially in children. We used an emotional Go/NoGo task to investigate modulations of the LPP to emotional (fearful, happy, sad) and calm faces in a sample of children and adolescents (age 11;00-14;11) diagnosed with a depressive disorder according to diagnostic parent interviews (K-SADS-PL) (n = 26) compared to a group of age-matched healthy controls (n = 26). LPP positivity was attenuated in children and adolescents with a depressive disorder as well as with higher self-reported depressive symptoms, suggesting reduced reactivity to emotional and calm faces. This is the first study to find generally blunted LPP responses in a clinical sample of depressed youth across reporters. Such dysfunctional modulation of neural activity may represent a potential biomarker for depressive disorders. The results call for further prospective studies investigating the course of the LPP before and after the onset of a depressive disorder in youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) often experience significant anxiety. A promising approach to anxiety intervention has emerged from cognitive studies of attention bias to threat. To investigate the utility of this intervention in WS, this study examined attention bias to happy and angry faces in individuals with WS ( N = 46). Results showed a significant difference in attention bias patterns as a function of IQ and anxiety. Individuals with higher IQ or higher anxiety showed a significant bias toward angry, but not happy faces, whereas individuals with lower IQ or lower anxiety showed the opposite pattern. These results suggest that attention bias interventions to modify a threat bias may be most effectively targeted to anxious individuals with WS with relatively high IQ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anxiety disorders are characterized by enhanced reactivity to threat, and event-related potentials (ERPs) are useful neural measures of the dynamics of threat processing. In particular, the late positive potential (LPP) is an ERP component that reflects sustained attention towards motivationally salient information. Previous studies in adults suggest that the LPP is enhanced to threatening stimuli in anxiety but blunted in depression; however, very little work has evaluated the LPP to threat in anxious youth. We measured the LPP during an emotional face-matching task in youth (age 7-19) with current anxiety disorders (n = 53) and healthy controls with no history of psychopathology (n = 37). We evaluated group differences, as well as the effect of depressive symptoms on the LPP. Youth with anxiety disorders exhibited enhanced LPPs to angry and fearful faces 1000-2000 ms after stimulus onset. Higher depressive symptoms were associated with reduced LPPs to angry faces across both groups. Enhanced LPPs to threatening faces were most apparent for social anxiety disorder, as opposed to generalized anxiety disorder or separation anxiety disorder. Results suggest the LPP may be a useful neural measure of threat reactivity in youth with anxiety disorders and highlight the importance of accounting for symptoms of both depression and anxiety when examining emotional processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotional expressions are important cues that capture our attention automatically. Although a wide range of work has explored the role and influence of emotions on cognition and behavior, little is known about the way that emotions influence motor actions. Moreover, considering how critical detecting emotional facial expressions in the environment can be, it is important to understand their impact even when they are not directly relevant to the task being performed. Our novel approach was to explore this issue from the attention-and-action perspective, using a task-irrelevant distractor paradigm in which participants are asked to reach for a target while a nontarget stimulus is also presented. We tested whether the movement trajectory would be influenced by irrelevant stimuli-faces with or without emotional expressions. The results showed that reaching paths veered toward faces with emotional expressions, in particular happiness, but not toward neutral expressions. This reinforces the view of emotions as attention-capturing stimuli that are, however, also potential sources of distraction for motor actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the effects of habitual social approach and avoidance motivation on the classification of facial expressions of different visual clarity. Participants ( N = 78) categorized partially masked emotional faces expressing either anger or happiness as positive or negative. Participants generally tended to interpret the facial expressions in a positive way. This positivity effect was reduced when persons were highly avoidance motivated. Social avoidance motivation predicted fewer positive and more negative interpretations in the least visible condition that provided extremely little information on the facial expression. Thus, people high in social avoidance motivation are likely to have anticipated angry faces as the facial stimuli offered only minimal information. The results for social approach motivation did not reach statistical significance. To conclude, it seems that persons who are most afraid of having negative social interactions (i.e., those high in social avoidance motivation), anticipate and interpret social information in the most negative way, which could lead to the reinforcement of the avoidance motivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rationale: Drug users often report using drugs to enhance social situations, and empirical studies support the idea that drugs increase both social behavior and the value of social interactions. One way that drugs may affect social behavior is by altering social processing, for example by decreasing perceptions of negative emotion in others. Objectives: We examined effects of d-amphetamine on processing of emotional facial expressions and on the social behavior of talking. We predicted amphetamine would enhance attention, identification, and responsivity to positive expressions, and that this in turn would predict increased talkativeness. Methods: Over three sessions, 36 healthy normal adults received placebo, 10, and 20 mg d-amphetamine under counterbalanced double-blind conditions. At each session, we measured processing of happy, fearful, sad, and angry expressions using an attentional visual probe task, a dynamic emotion identification task, and measures of facial muscle activity. We also measured talking. Results: Amphetamine decreased the threshold for identifying all emotions, increased negative facial responses to sad expressions, and increased talkativeness. Contrary to our hypotheses, amphetamine did not alter attention to, identification of, or facial responses to positive emotions specifically. Interestingly, the drug decreased the threshold to identify all emotions, and this effect was uniquely related to increased talkativeness, even after controlling for overall sensitivity to amphetamine. Conclusions: The results suggest that amphetamine may encourage sociability by increasing sensitivity to subtle emotional expressions. These findings suggest novel social mechanisms that may contribute to the rewarding effects of amphetamine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We combined functional imaging and genetics to investigate the behavioral and neural effects of a dysbindin-1 (DTNBP1) genotype associated with the expression level of this important synaptic protein, which has been implicated in schizophrenia. On a working memory (WM) task for emotional faces, participants with the genotype related to increased expression showed higher WM capacity for happy faces compared with the genotype related to lower expression. Activity in several task-related brain areas with known DTNBP1 expression was increased, including hippocampal, temporal and frontal cortex. Although these increases occurred across emotions, they were mostly observed in areas whose activity correlated with performance for happy faces. This suggests effects of variability in DTNBP1 on emotion-specific WM capacity and region-specific task-related brain activation in humans. Synaptic effects of DTNBP1 implicate that altered dopaminergic and/or glutamatergic neurotransmission may be related to the increased WM capacity. The combination of imaging and genetics thus allows us to bridge the gap between the cellular/molecular and systems/behavioral level and extend the cognitive neuroscience approach to a comprehensive biology of cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

entional biases for negative stimuli have been observed in school-age and adolescent children of depressed mothers and may reflect a vulnerability to depression. The direction of these biases and whether they can be identified in early childhood remains unclear. The current study examined attentional biases in 5-7-year-old children of depressed and non-depressed mothers. Following a mood induction, children participated in a dot-probe task assessing biases for sad and happy faces. There was a significant interaction of group and sex: daughters of depressed mothers attended selectively to sad faces, while children of controls and sons of depressed mothers did not exhibit biases. No effects were found for happy stimuli. These findings suggest that attentional biases are discernible in early childhood and may be vulnerability markers for depression. The results also raise the possibility that sex differences in cognitive biases are evident before the emergence of sex differences in the prevalence of depression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has shown that cognitive processes like the attribution of hostile intention or angry emotion to others contribute to the development and maintenance of conduct problems. However, the role of memory has been understudied in comparison with attribution biases. The aim of this study was thus to test if a memory bias for angry faces was related to conduct problems in youth. Adolescents from a junior secondary school were presented with angry and happy faces and were later asked to recognize the same faces with a neutral expression. They also completed an impulsivity questionnaire. A teacher assessed their behavior. The results showed that a better recognition of angry faces than happy faces predicted conduct problems and hyperactivity/inattention as reported by the teacher. The memory bias effect was more pronounced for impulsive adolescents. It is suggested that a memory bias for angry faces favors disruptive behavior but that a good ability to control impulses may moderate the negative impact of this bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]